China is cracking down on expensive gifts and mooncakes for this year's mid-autumn festival. Photo: Sanghee Liu

Gone too are the gift boxes packaged with expensive liquor, or even gold watches, for those well-wishers particularly keen to make a good impression.

The new leadership has identified reining in overt graft and waste of public funds as a key way to win back the hearts and minds of a general public, who are increasingly disillusioned with endemic corruption and a widening gulf in income equality.

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“Decadent styles have polluted our festival culture in recent years with the sending of increasingly extravagant gifts such as mooncakes … drifting further away from our frugal virtues,” Vice-Premier Wang Qishan, the head of the party's corruption-busting disciplinary committee, said last week.

Having already banned government officials from spending public funds on lavish banquets, expensive wine and luxury cars, the President has labelled the mid-autumn festival, which runs into the China's long national day holiday in October, an “important test” of party officials' behaviour.

China is cracking down on expensive gifts and mooncakes during this year's mid-Autumn festival. Photo: Sanghee Liu

A telephone hotline has also been set up for members of the public to report any suspected misuse of public funds during the holiday period.

A saleswoman at one busy supermarket said authorities had issued restrictions on gift-box designs to ensure they were less ostentatious than previous years.

“This year we don't have any luxurious packages,” she said. “Cheaper mooncakes have been selling much better than expensive ones.”

Like most holidays, the mid-autumn festival has become rampantly commercialised, with little emphasis on the festival's origins: a romantic fable of a goddess who attained immortality but lived on the moon to be near her mortal husband.

More than 280,000 tonnes of mooncakes worth 16 billion yuan ($2.8 billion) were sold in China last year. But this year the China Association of Bakery and Confectionery is tipping a sharp drop in sales.

“None of us who sell mooncakes will make any money this year,” Sun Lanyu, a vendor in Beijing's business district, said.